technorati.com blog news search

[davidh]

I happened to read somewhere that technorati.com was supposed to be the best blog news search. So I did a very unscientific and crude test of technorati.com versus blogsearch.google.com and in a sample of size one , technorati.com seemed to be significantly better in both timeliness and breadth of coverage.

Both blog search engines provide a sort of meta-RSS-aggregator function. That is, your personally designed/chosen search terms can form a query which results in an artificial news feed (meta feed) that combines all articles in all the polled blog news feeds that match the search terms. You just copy the generated URL and paste it into your RSS feed reader.

A while ago, I got sort of tired of trying to compare and evaluate standalone and/or web-based RSS feed readers, and decided to stick with the my.yahoo.com web-based RSS feed reader for a while.

It's a little bit like making your own newspaper. And with the image blocking feature of Firefox, I don't have to look at ads either. I just have about one inch of waste blank space at the top of my.yahoo.com web page ;)

DH

[Judy G. Russell]

Tis whole area is one where the changes are almost breathtakingly fast... so what works today may be different tomorrow. Still, the concept of making one's own news page is terrific.

[davidh]

Tis whole area is one where the changes are almost breathtakingly fast... so what works today may be different tomorrow. Still, the concept of making one's own news page is terrific.

The fact that RSS is based on XML and is the overwhelmingly predominant application of XML may have made it harder for the 800 pound gorillas (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) to dominate news feeds with proprietary protocols. (For example, finally MSN and Yahoo claim that their IM's will be interoperable, but I'm not sure it's reality even now.)

Along another line of thought:

QUOTE:

O'Reilly Network's President and CEO Dale Dougherty:

"What interests me about RSS is the ability to begin to monitor the flow of new information on the net. We all know what sites exist; what we really want to know is how often sites generate new information. As a writer and editor, I thought Meerkat would be valuable to watch what was happening in different technical communities. What I especially like about RSS and looking at feeds from hundreds of sites is that you can see the Web work at a grassroots level. I thought that Meerkat is the kind of tool I'd want to keep track of what is going on. We realized that this wasn't just useful to editors but to anyone who wants to be able to respond to new information.

I'm not sure where Meerkat will take us, but it feels like it's opening up a remarkable new view of the Web. We'd really like to see more and more sites become RSS-enabled. RSS can do for them what Yahoo did for them in 1994, which is drive traffic by letting others know what you are doing. The difference is now we can notify others not just of a new site, but of new stories -- new activity on our site."

UNQUOTE

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/2.html

O'Reilly Meerkat was closed in 2006, but the ideas in this quote still apply.

DH

[Judy G. Russell]

Conceptually it's just fabulous. Of course, if the net neutrality concept doesn't make it into the telecommunications legislation now wending its way through Congress, we'll all lose much of this concept, but...